Each and every one of us, regardless of our culture, colour, creed, or intellectual challenge, begins a quest from birth to lead a productive and fruitful life. Although, this inner drive is felt at various levels by adults, it is much more intense when one considers the life of his or her own child. Therefore, newborn babies are generally symbols of hope and great expectations to their parents.
Parents and educators should appreciate, however, that one of the greatest encouragements that one can give a child for preparing him/her to accomplish his/her quest in life is to foster the development of learning strategies at a very young age. The experiences of the first years of life are believed to be crucial to an individual's future well being. It is believed that the first three years of a child's life, when his/her growth is most rapid, is one of the most important periods there will ever be for increasing his/her mental abilities.
Scholars in the field of cognitive development of children also believe that children have the ability to learn early in life. They also believe that this ability should be developed in order to better prepare the child for his/her school years and adult life.
In a first reference; "The Growth of the Mind", by Stanley I. Greenspan M.D., pp.74-109 and 133-160, (1997) the author teaches the importance of helping a child creating and organizing his/her internal world that permits what we call thinking. Furthermore, the author teaches that there is mounting evidence that environmental influences can alter the physical structure of the brain, determining in part how genes express themselves in both biology and behaviour. The author also points out that educational experts maintained that improving children's early environment would raise their intellectual abilities and better prepare them to survive, even thrive in the complex world they would inherit.
In a second reference: "Cognitive Development: An Information Processing Approach", by John McShane, pp. 161-198, (1991), the author teaches that infants are capable of learning from birth, which implies the presence of a basic memory system and that the basic structure of the memory system is part of an innate architecture of cognition.
In another book entitled "The Vygotsky Reader" by Rene van der Veer & Jaan Valsiner, pp. 142-146, (1994), the authors further teach that a child memory, even at the most primitive stages of psychological development comprises principally two different types of memory functions. The first type of memory function called the natural memory, is characterized by the immediate impression of material by the simple after-effect of actual experiences. This kind of memory is very near to perception and is dominating in primitive behaviour.
The second type of memory function is often called the instrumental memory, associative memory, or the use of learning strategies. It goes far beyond the limits of natural memory, adding to the psychological structure of the natural memory certain external signs that are used as active agents governing the psychological process from without. When the infant cannot solve the problem by way of direct mobilization of his/her natural memory, he/she has recourse to certain external manipulations, organizing himself/herself through the organization of objects, creating artificial stimuli that have a reverse action of allowing him/her to solve the problem of remembering. This is a psychological behaviour which helps a child to overcome the limits set for memory by natural laws, and what is most important according to the authors, it is primarily this mechanism in memory which is subject to development.
The inventor of the instant inventions believes that through free play with educational toy systems that are abounding in external stimuli, children are provided with experiences necessary to teach them essential learning strategies associated with development of the advanced memory functions. It is believed that educational toys abounding in auxiliary signs by which a child can associate new information, can lay a foundation of strategic behaviours which the young infant can experience and prosper from for future learning. No longer will strategic behaviour randomly emerge from a child's early childhood experience. By virtue of educational toys rich in learning stimuli, the very associative memory function that children possess at birth may be transformed into an emergent pattern of strategic abilities which may support their intelligence for the rest of their lives.
It has been found that the educational toys of the prior art, in general, lack the auxiliary signs or the variety of stimuli, to effectively develop learning strategies of children. For example, the Great Britain Patent 214,098 issued on Apr. 17, 1924 to C. H. Planck illustrates an alphabet puzzle. The puzzle shows the letters of the alphabet with illustrations corresponding to the letters. Each puzzle piece interlocks with only one other letter piece by way of a unique profile common only to adjacent pieces, such that a child can learn the sequence of the letters of the alphabet.
In a second example, the U.S. Pat. No. 3,302,310 issued on Feb. 7, 1967 to G. R. Leven, discloses an educational puzzle for teaching the phonetic of letters. The puzzle has pieces illustrating letters and pieces illustrating objects. Each letter piece is lockable, by way of a uniquely shaped tab, only with a related series of object pieces. A piece "A" for example is lockable with an object piece having the letter "A" such as an "apple", a "fan", or a "bat".
In yet another example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,575,658 issued on Nov. 19, 1996 to C. Barnard, discloses another form of puzzle for teaching the letters of the alphabet. The puzzle has three sets of puzzle pieces. A first set of pieces represents the lowercase letters. A second set of pieces represents the uppercase letters. A third set of pieces represents groups of letters. The lowercase letters fit into corresponding cavities in the uppercase letters. The uppercase letters fit into cavities in the group pieces. Hence, the puzzle provides a means for teaching simultaneously the uppercase letters, the lowercase letters and the sequence of the letters of the alphabet. In this invention, the lowercase letters may have a different colour than the uppercase letters, and of course, all the pieces in one group on a larger puzzle piece may be identically coloured.
For a child who does not yet know the letters of the alphabet, the learning of these letters using the educational puzzles of the prior art may represent an insurmountable task. The signs by which a child may associate and remember the new information are limited to the shape of the letters, the shape of the interlocking tabs joining pairs of pieces together, and the colours common to two or more letters in a same group. It will be appreciated that children are not all gifted equally for colour and shape recognition. According to some studies, particularly the aforesaid book entitled "Cognitive Development: An Information Processing Approach", by John McShane, pp. 164-167, (1991), children are known to be more talented for image or picture recognition than for memorizing shapes and colours.
This observation will be further appreciated by the persons fervent of puzzles. It is known to these persons that the difficulty level in finding the right placement of a puzzle piece increases substantially when the piece belongs to a section of a puzzle representing an homogeneous blue sky, a dense forest or a calm sea. In these cases the player can only rely on shape and colour recognition for finding the correct placement of the piece. The inventor of the present inventions believes that the same difficulty level is experienced by a young infant trying to learn the letters of the alphabet or numerical symbols when the only external stimuli available to that child are those of shape and colour.